Almost a year after the public appointment of the first artistic director, EXPOSED, the city’s first international photography festival, has finally opened its doors to Turin. Until June 2nd, 28 exhibitions will animate 23 major institutions – including museums, foundations and independent spaces – of the Piedmontese capital to make the general public (and not only) aware of the new languages and new forms of collaboration that the photographic medium reserves for us for tomorrow.
The title New Landscapes [Nuovi Paesaggi] in fact, it only partially alludes to the most canonical interpretation of the term. Like no other medium, photography, throughout the previous century and still today, has often reflected on dichotomies such as diversity and inclusion, beauty and destruction, solitude and density, virtuality and tangibility, movement and inertia.
So what are the “new landscapes” that await us? They intend to be the new ways of producing and understanding the medium to prepare the public for the most necessary and urgent changes to interpret contemporary reality. The focus of EXPOSED is outlined in embracing new interpretations, new thoughts, new points of view and experiences related to photographic artistic creation.
The variety of approaches and languages presented in each exhibition venue of the festival (ranging from CAMERA to the Regional Museum of Natural Sciences, from the Polo del ‘900 to Palazzo Madama, from the Gallerie d’Italia to Palazzo Carignano) allow different audiences to construct own landscapes, with a view to rediscovering mutual personal relationships. There is also an eye towards new technologies and the possibilities offered, which embellish the photographic art (or rather, the photographic eye) and push us to ask ourselves questions about the real meaning of the use and diffusion of images.
Guided by the experience of Menno Liauw and Salvatore Vitale, already at the helm of FUTURES – the largest European platform for photography – several city institutions have decided to join the festival albeit presenting an autonomous proposal. Worthy of mention are the Castello di Rivoli, the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation and the Agnelli Art Gallery. These realities, already widely established in the panorama of Italian contemporary art, put themselves at the service of the new festival to make the public more aware of the state of the art of contemporary photographic practice and expand the already rich curatorial proposal.
Finally, not only exhibitions, but also talks, seminars, portfolio reviews, film screenings, meetings, an independent publishing fair, edu activities and many other initiatives in the city.
